Past Quotes

People forget history nowadays, he lamented, that is what the ego does, making one the prisoner of one's inflated present, ignoring the humble past one has lived.

~ Aporva Kala

Of that time, there is still much we do not know.

~ Tom Bissell

It's been my experience, Langford, that the past always has a way of returning. Those who don't learn, or can't remember it, are doomed to repeat it.

~ Steve Berry

Is not the pastness of the past the more profound, the more legendary, the more immediately it falls before the present ?

~ Thomas Mann

History is always a grand fantasy... To reconstruct is to invent.

~ Eça De Queirós

Our parents' generation carried the past memorialized in paint, porcelain, and wood; we cast it off. Even our national history is remembered in terms of the worst we did, not the best.

~ P.d. James

You know what I realized? No one else lives in my memories but me.

~ Liza M. Wiemer

History was a bitch sometimes. You couldn’t change where you were from. But still, you didn’t have to stay there. You didn’t have to stay stuck in the past, like the ladies in the DAR, or the Gatlin Historical Society, or the Sisters. And you didn’t have to accept that things had to be the way they were, like Lena.

~ Kami Garcia

It is said that those who fail to remember history are doomed to repeat it. That’s not quite correct. We all forget history. The key is whether we have a way to go back to rediscover what we forget. More directly, the key is whether an objective past can keep us honest.

~ Lawrence Lessig

She mourned the history that the invisible intruder had erased, but not enough that she would spend a second more of her future feeling the emptiness.

~ Thomm Quackenbush

Why slum it where people were burdened by yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that? By history? Here, on the Island, they had learnt how to deal with history, how to sling it carelessly on your back and stride out across the download with the breeze in your face.

~ Julian Barnes

Memory, therefore, not simply as the resurrection of one’s private past, but an immersion in the past of others, which is to say: history - which one both participates in and is a witness to, is a part of and apart from. Everything, therefore, is present in his mind at once, as if each element were reflecting the light of all the others, and at the same time emitting its own unique and unquenchable radiance.

~ Paul Auster

The frontier will nevertheless survive in the attitudes a few of us inherited from it. One of those attitudes--to me a beatitude--is the conviction that the past matters, that history weighs on us and refuses to be forgotten by us, and that the worst poverty women--or men--can suffer is to be bereft of their past.

~ Shirley Abbott

History would be a revelation of the future as much as it was a study of the past.

~ Arundhati Roy

Furthermore, a society with no sense of the past, with no sense of the human role as significant not merely in experiencing history but in creating it can have no sense of destiny. And what kind of society is it that has no sense of destiny and no sense of self? That has no need or will to measure itself by the record of human achievement and the range of human endowment? And here we may pause to ask what our society measures itself by. Is it only by the ability to gratify immediate appetites, capacity for consumption, and the GNP?

~ Robert Penn Warren

But, the stultifying lingo aside, the question I raise is a vital one for us all, we are all stuck with trying to find the meaning of our lives, and the only thing we have to work on, or with, is our past.

~ Robert Penn Warren

When the past is mentioned, some cry! When the past is mentioned, some ponder! When the past is mentioned, never again comes into the mind of some people. When the past is mentioned, some recall their had I known! The past is past, but its footprints never go!

~ Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

When the past gets its teeth into our daily life, it may get to grips with an astringent reality and adjust our timeline. By recognizing ourselves in the light of our history, we become aware of what we are. (Going back to yesterday)

~ Erik Pevernagie

There is no denying it, our past stinks and seeps into our present. Occasionally I get such a potent whiff of history that my mind spins and my stomach lurches.

~ Jinat Rehana Begum

The lessons of past is critical for teachings in present. And experience in the future.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

The past is the occupational realm of historians—their daily work—and scholars have debated what their stance toward these social issues should be. As citizens and professionals, historians may naturally form a desire, as Carl Becker puts it, “to do work in the world.” That is, they might aspire to write history that is not only of scholarly value but also has a salutary impact in society. Becker defines the appropriate impact and the historian’s proper role as “correcting and rationalizing for common use Mr. Everyman’s mythological adaption of what actually happened.”That process is never simple, however, when the subject involves divisions so deep that they led to civil wars. One issue that inevitably leads to controversy is the extent to which history involves moral judgment. Another is the power of myths, exerting their influence on society and acting in opposition to the findings of historical research [190—91].

~ Paul D. Escott

But he had expressed to Mme. du Chatelet the hope that a way out might lie in applying philosophy to history, and endeavoring to trace, beneath the flux of political events, the history of the human mind. 'Only philosophers should write history,' he said. 'In all nations, history is disfigured by fable, till at last philosophy comes to enlighten man; and when it does finally arrive in the midst of darkness, it finds the human mind so blinded centuries of error, that it can hardly undeceive it; it finds ceremonies, facts and monuments, heaped up to prove lies.' 'History,' he concludes, 'is after all nothing but a pack of tricks which we play upon the dead;' we transform the past to suit our wishes for the future, and in the upshot 'history proves that anything can be proved by history.

~ Will Durant

The past is magnetic. It draws us in.

~ Jeanette Winterson

If she opened the closet with her skeletons, they might drag her in with them.

~ Kayla Krantz

This is Roshana, the last queen of the Amulen Empire, back when my people ruled all the lands from the east to the west. She is something of a legend among us. Every queen aspires to learn from her mistakes.”“Her mistakes? Surely you mean her victories.”“What?”I frown at her. “Roshana was one of the greatest queens in the world. She ended the Mountain Wars, she routed Sanhezriyah the Mad, she—”“For a foreign serving girl, you are strangely well versed in Amulen history.”“I spent a lot of time in libraries as a girl.”“Were you there to dust the scrolls or read them?”“Surely Roshana’s victories outweigh her errors.”“The higher you rise, the farther you fall. For all her wisdom, Roshana was fooled by the jinni, believing it was her friend, and then it destroyed her. Ever since that day, my people have hunted the jinn. There is no creature more vicious and untrustworthy.”“This is not the story I heard,” I say softly. “My people tell it differently. That the jinni truly was a friend to Roshana but was forced to turn against her. That she had no choice.”“Surely I know how my own ancestress died,” returns the princess, a bit hotly. “Anyway, it was a long time ago, but we Amulens do not forget.

~ Jessica Khoury

Their message will never be decoded, not only because there is no key to it, but also because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

~ Milan Kundera

Their message will never be decoded… because people have no patience to listen to it in an age when the accumulation of messages old and new is such that their voices cancel one another out. Today history is no more than a thin thread of the remembered stretching over an ocean of the forgotten, but time moves on, and an epoch of millennia will come which the inextensible memory of the individual will be unable to encompass; whole centuries and millennia will therefore fall away, centuries of painting and music, centuries of discoveries, of battles, of books, and this will be dire, because man will lose the notion of his self, and his history, unfathomable, unencompassable, will shrivel into a few schematic signs destitute of all sense.

~ Milan Kundera

Is there a notion of hope (and of our responsibility to the future) that could be shared by believers and nonbelievers? What can it be based on now? Does an idea of the end, one that does not imply disinterest in the future but rather a constant examination of the errors of the past, have a critical fun

~ Umberto Eco

The past was a minefield about which few maps seemed to agree. And why should that surprise me? It's a big place.p. 30

~ Danilo Kiš

How queer it was for two lovers to suddenly turn into strangers?

~ Diyar Harraz

The past has come apart events are vagueingthe future is inexploitable

~ Mina Loy

I don't like regressing - I move beyond. Life belongs to the future and I believe in creating History rather than visiting and revisiting the past.

~ Amit Abraham

Even if yesterday existed, today is just real, not a fantasy like the past.

~ Michael Bassey Johnson

He felt his presence on earth being denied, even as he stood there. He was forbidden access; the past refused to admit him. It only reminded him that this arbitrary place, where he'd landed and made his life, was not his

~ Jhumpa Lahiri

Even if we have bad feelings about our past and it causes a sense of alienation, it belongs to our history. Its benchmarks are stored in the granary of our mind and crucial evaluations for the future cannot be made without consulting the archive of our memory. ( “Not without the past”)

~ Erik Pevernagie

When we are “time traveling”, we may trip over problems from the past which distort our memory. If we are weary of dealing with lost causes or lame ducks in our history, we have to make up our mind and give up destructive thinking patterns. At that juncture, time has come to go back to the future. ( “A glimpse of the future )

~ Erik Pevernagie

Judgement is always based on experience and sometimes you will battle a person's history first, before commonsense will ever win the war.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The claim oh, that's ancient history is almost always a wish, am anxious attempt to put a boundary of time around some event that really is not over at all; it is a bid to silence the past.

~ Robert A. Orsi

Before we're born we've all of us been dead for millions of years...but we're always afraid of going back...

~ Leonardo Donofrio

Don't deny the past. Remember everything. If you're bitter, be bitter. Cry it out! Scream! Denial is gangrene.

~ Joy Kogawa